Perspective

Umpire's Rage, Father's Fight

By ROBERT LIPSYTE

Published: November 24, 1996

POLAND, Ohio, Nov. 23—
On the 52-inch television set in John Hirschbeck's living room, the moving images seem unreal, a parody of Norman Rockwell's America. Almost nose to nose, an umpire, a manager and a star baseball player are screaming as they jostle for position near home plate. Suddenly, the player spits at the umpire, a hurricane spray on this large screen.

Two months ago, that picture became a symbol for many people of a nation and its pastime losing civility, discipline and respect for authority. For the umpire, Hirschbeck, being spat upon was also the beginning of a wrenching replay of the past five years of emotional torment as an incurable disease attacked his children.

''I was shocked when he spit on me, and when he wasn't suspended immediately I was very disappointed,'' said Hirschbeck, watching that video clip yet again last week. ''But I could deal with all that. It's when he dragged my family in, when he stripped away my private life and talked about John, that he ripped my heart out.''

It was after the game on Sept. 27 in Toronto that the player, Roberto Alomar of the Baltimore Orioles, declared that the reason Hirschbeck had called him out on a third strike that looked wide and then ejected him for complaining had to do with the umpire's turning ''bitter'' after the death of his young son three years ago. The next day, when Hirschbeck first learned about the player's comments from reporters asking for a response, he charged into the Orioles' locker room. He was restrained from Alomar by a fellow umpire.

Alomar was later reported as saying that he spat because Hirschbeck called him ''names,'' including, in some accounts, an ethnic slur. The umpire denies this, although he admits to using expletives of a more general nature right after the spitting and during the locker-room episodes. The third man at the plate, Orioles Manager Davey Johnson, has refused to offer his version. Last week, Johnson said: ''Anything I say would just accelerate this thing. It does no good to talk about umpires in the papers.'' He would not elaborate when he said: ''I think they're both guilty.''

There have been apologies and acceptances, mostly as statements delivered through the news media. Because the Orioles didn't make the World Series and Hirschbeck was not scheduled to work post-season games, that ugly moment in Canada was soon obscured by a thrilling Yankee victory and Frank Torre's transplanted heart.

The Hirschbecks gratefully retreated into the protective cave of this small town. They needed to conserve their strength; the rare brain disorder -- adrenoleukodystrophy -- that killed John at age 8, also affects his younger brother, Michael, 10. Their sisters, Erin, 8, and Megan, 5, are genetic carriers, like their mother, and the disorder might affect them later in life.

In ALD, a faulty gene is unable to produce the enzymes that clear away toxins that destroy nerve cells in the brain.

In the summer of 1991, when John was 6, his symptoms first appeared. He seemed a little vague, unusually timid; there were brief brownouts of energy and attention. Hirschbeck was away on his ninth season as an American League umpire and Denise was pregnant, and busy with three preschoolers and a large house on 10 wooded acres. It would be the last time that she thought of herself living a ''charmed life, almost too perfect,'' in which a flight attendant and an umpire fell in love on a Puerto Rico beach in 1980, and went on to ''have it all.''

''John was such a bright, lively boy, beyond his years,'' said Mrs. Hirschbeck, sitting at the kitchen table. ''At the age of 1, he spoke in complete sentences. At restaurants he pretended he could read the menu. He was very adventuresome and outgoing.

''And then he changed. He was afraid to go trick-or-treating on Halloween. He forgot how old he was. He had reading problems in first grade.''

One doctor diagnosed attention deficit disorder and prescribed Ritalin, then other drugs when the symptoms persisted. At spring training, a usually happy family holiday, John became terrified of a dead bee. Always athletic, he was now afraid to swim in the pool. The Hirschbecks quickly moved up the medical chain and onto an emotional roller coaster of hope and dread and guilt.

On April 7, 1992, just before he worked the season opener in Seattle, Hirschbeck called home for the results of the magnetic resonance imaging test of John's brain. Although there would have to be a second m.r.i., there did seem to be suspicious gray spots on the fatty white myelin sheath. Hirschbeck flew home after the game.

He was in Akron, Ohio, two days later when the diagnosis was made, then on to the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, a leading research center and hospital for children with brain disorders. Dr. Hugo Moser, the ALD expert featured in the film ''Lorenzo's Oil'' about another family struggling with the disease, studied John and Michael and sent them on to Dr. William Krivit at the University of Minnesota Hospital and Clinic for bone marrow transplants. The only hope of halting the progress of the disease was to introduce a healthy gene that could produce enzymes to stop the toxins before they tore though the sheath to the axons that connect nerve cells to the rest of the body.